Free markets, morality, and the civilization of natural liberty
| Autor | Samuel Gregg |
| Cargo | Director de Investigación de Acton Institute |
| Páginas | 10-13 |
Serie Informe Económica 265
am very happy to be in Chile again, 17 years after my
rst visit. And thank you to all of you for being here
tonight and supporting this wonderful organization,
Libertad y Desarrollo, which does so much work in Chile
and Latin America to promote a society of freedom and
responsibility. I have always admired its work and its
people. They understand that freedom and responsibility
must go together: that there is no responsibility without
freedom; that there is no freedom without responsibility;
and that only through freedom and responsibility can we
achieve true development.
And one reason why Libertad y Desarrollo remains so
necessary today is that we now live in a time in which those
movements that want to promote a very different vision of
society, a very different vision of development, are on the
march in virtually every country in the world. From Latin
America, to North America, to Europe, to as far away as my
native Australia, numerous groups who want to diminish
freedom, who want the state to take over more and more of
our lives are gaining strength. Some of them are populists:
the people who have brought the once proud nation of
Venezuela to its knees. Some of them are social democrats.
They do not propose revolution, but they do work day after
day, week after week, year after year, to slowly spread the
dead hand of bureaucracy throughout society. Their goal
is what the great French philosopher of freedom, Alexis
de Tocqueville, called “soft despotism”: a society in which
citizens give up their freedom in return for the illusion of
perpetual security through the state.
But what’s common to all these groups is that they don’t
primarily claim to be increasing the state’s role in our lives
in the name of greater economic effectiveness. No! They
are very careful to justify their programs by appealing to
words like “justice,” words like “solidarity,” words like “the
I
FREE MARKETS, MORALITY, AND
THE CIVILIZATION OF NATURAL LIBERTY
people.”In other words, they are not afraid to make moral
arguments.
And thus it has always been. As you all know, this year 2017
marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution:
a revolution that lead to the establishment in Russia of a
criminal regime; a revolution that appealed to a criminal
ideology to morally justify the enslavement, imprisonment
and death of millions of men, women, and children.
Despite all these horrors, all these deaths -many of which
they personally ordered- Bolsheviks like Lenin and Stalin,
and their intellectual godfathers Marx and Engels, were
absolutely convinced that they were morally right in doing
what they did. And many, many people agree with them.
100 years later, the opponents of freedom have not
changed. They know that if you want to persuade people
to support particular policies, you cannot simply rely
on appeals, for example, to economic arguments. Now,
that’s partly because populist and social democratic
policies do not work. That’s a rather major problem. But
it’s also because populists and social democrats have,
paradoxically enough, recognized that man does not live
by bread alone. That we are more than just producers and
consumers. That we are by nature and, I believe, by God’s
design, the only creatures in this world capable of knowing
the truth about good and evil. That we alone possess the
quality of free will that allows us to act morally or immorally.
How do we know that the opponents of liberty, in their own
strange way, understand this truth? Well, ironically enough,
we know this by considering what we—the “non-left”—are
generally good at doing, and what we presently seem to be
not-so-good at doing. We are, as many of our opponents will
concede, very good at developing policies that positively
transform people’s lives. Thanks to many of the people and
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